Why Regulators Are About to Hammer Crypto

Photo by Giu Vicente on Unsplash

As of this morning, I am in possession of a pitch deck for GTX. Let me start by saying I am desperately hoping this entire thing is an elaborate practical joke. Maybe it is. I haven’t personally confirmed with the founders yet.

However… interesting choice of name, don’t you think?

Well, check this out:

Yes. It’s a deliberate play on the FTX name. In fact, it’s a marketplace for the (inside) trading of claims for things like FTX, Celsius, etc.

So obviously, this is already enough smoke that one would expect there to be a three-alarm fire under the hood.

Some “features” include the (potentially anonymous) trading of bankruptcy claims, using those claims as backing for loans, and having some sort of stablecoin associated with this activity.

It’s almost as if someone took every incredibly, profoundly, wildly bad idea from 2008 and tried to put them together into a single product. I’m not even mad. This thing is a work of art.

Who are the founders, one might then ask, who are capable of such incredible performance art in the face of all sanity and financial sense?

You can’t make this shit up (or, if you did make this shit up, congratulations, because you are the next George Carlin). They could have only improved on this if someone senior from Terra is working on the stablecoin.

Bad Facts Lead to Bad Law

This is a perfect example of the conduct that will lead to regulatory overreach in the other direction.

First of all, let us start with the conduct:

If you blew up a hedge fund after lying about your exposures, and then when confronted with this, you ran away and hid in a remote jurisdiction while refusing to cooperate with liquidators and court proceedings, you don’t deserve to get funded for a second company. You don’t even…